Co-founders Charlie Hu and Kevin He started Bitlayer as a research-oriented passion project based on the BitVM paradigm, quickly spearheading the effort into an opportunity to unlock immense liquidity in the Bitcoin asset and ecosystem. Funnelling their extensive experience leading international teams to global success at Polygon, Polkadot, and Huobi, the two turned Bitlayer into the most relevant Bitcoin L2 in the space. In July 2024, Bitlayer announced its $11M Series A round led by Franklin Templeton and ABCDE. By October of the same year the team had raised an extended Series A round securing $9M more in funding, this time led by Polychain Capital. In less than a year’s time following the raise announcements, the team at Bitlayer has made staggering progress. Since the launch of its V1 mainnet, the project reached an all-time high TVL of 850 million with over 200 Dapps launched on the L2. Bitlayer’s ecosystem is growing and thriving with projects building Bitcoin DeFi (BTC-Fi) applications, ranging from BTC dexes, staking, restaking and liquid staking, infra, oracles, interoperability, data availability, and runes and ordinals, amongst many others. Recently, the team announced the first BitVM bridge solution testnet built in the Bitcoin ecosystem. “The bridge is an absolute necessity for Defi to happen on Bitcoin, ” said Charlie Hu, Co-founder of Bitlayer. “The main differentiator when compared to previous solutions is the trust assumption. The existing multisig set-up requires the majority of signers to be honest; if it happens that the majority of signers are malicious then the bridge becomes insecure, which is what happened during some of the major hacks we’ve seen lately in the space. Our bridging solution is trust-minimized which means that only one signer needs to be honest in order for the bridge to be secure.” The BitVM trust-minimized bridge enables the flow of bitcoin to an array of blockchains and decentralized applications. The recent announcement of Bitlayer’s partnerships with key Layer 1 blockchains such as Base, Arbitrum, Starknet, Sonic SVM, and Plume Network signal rising demand and interest. Now, with the imminent launch of Bitlayer Mainnet V2 in Q2 2025, Bitlayer is finally bringing BitVM to the world stage. “ T he Bitlayer network’s Mainnet V2 is set to transition to a Bitcoin Rollup, a first-of-its-kind innovation in the market, bringing Bitcoin-level security to the Layer 2 ecosystem,” says Kevin He, Bitlayer Co-founder. BitVM allows for trust-minimized deployment of Bitcoin into a host of blockchains, DeFi protocols, and decentralized applications in order to earn yield, staking rewards, lending and borrowing features, and much more. The BitVM paradigm does not require a fork to the Bitcoin protocol, and instead provides a technical solution built with zero-knowledge proofs, rollup architecture, and trust-minimized bridging. Institutional investors, OGs, whales, traders, and holders can deploy their Bitcoin to earn yield rewards, in a non-custodial, trust-minimized way. And so Bitlayer continues its vision to untap Bitcoin’s full Defi potential, teaming up with clients, community, and ecosystem partners to make history for Bitcoin. This content is sponsored and does not serve as an endorsement by Blockworks. The veracity of this content has not been verified and should not serve as financial advice. We encourage readers to conduct their own research before making financial decisions. Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: Blockworks Daily : The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam. Empire : Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto. Forward Guidance : Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance. 0xResearch : Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more. Lightspeed : Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks. The Drop : For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
